An adventure in collection, refurbishing, and reselling vintage sewing machines and what is learned along the way.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Disappointment?

No posts for over a week! Not only was I busy getting ready for a craft fair, but manning our booth for 11 hours seemed to absorb all my free time for a week. Here I am, posing for the camera:

Karen in her booth, waiting to sell her quilted goods

My daughter Kelly drove and set up on Saturday, staying the whole day and working at selling her jewelry. Neither of us were blown away by our sales but we did sell our crafts and made a little bit of money just to keep us going! My other daughter, Alison, came to pick me up so we could load her van with the tall Gridwall structure and other bulky items that wouldn't fit in my smaller rental car. Rental car? When my Forester was rear-ended a couple weeks ago, it was finally claimed as a total loss so I was driving a much smaller-for-hauling rental. We also crowded into this busy schedule car shopping and finally came home with a Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo. This is a very nice vehicle for hauling all sorts of set-ups for craft fairs as well as sewing machine cabinets. No, no, no! We are downsizing the cabinet collection so I can get this new vehicle into the garage, not collecting more.

In my last post about the Pfaff 332 sewing machine, I was glad I got it sewing again and needed to work on making those decorative stitches. Here's what I found out I could do:

At the bottom are straight stitches then moving on to zigzag. Not bad, tension is fairly well adjusted. I could make some of the patterns, note the wavy pink stitch pattern next, but when I would "shift gears" into another pattern it would only start the pattern but then could not shift back. Everything moved fine for some of the pattern selections but not others? This sounded a bit familiar so I took a bright light and peered down into the top to see one nylon/plastic gear for the pattern mechanism:

Red arrow points to hidden plastic gear

It's pretty hard to see even when I point it out, but that gear has a crack in it. For a white gear turned yellow, that crack was black, probably filled with oil over time so it had been there for some time. I have not found a replacement gear on ebay yet so I think this will be one of those long searches or getting a donor sewing machine with a decent gear. So disappointing, especially since this sewing machine runs really nice, has a good stitch, and is worth repairing, if only the right part can be found. Yup, a needle in a haystack kind of a job.

About Me

How my addiction to vintage sewing machines has grown from refurbishing, to sales, to a repair business. Come along with me as I have learned by doing, making mistakes along the way, taking and teaching classes, all for the love and sense of accomplishment in keeping these ol' gals still running. I think it might be what keeps this ol' gal running, too.